I'm not the guy you're replying to, but from my experience I think it is less a matter of features and more about different ways of doing the same thing. Basic stuff as how selection works (will the selection marquee select only the encompassing objects, every object it touches or a fragment of the object?) is very important when you are spending hours a day with a tool.

It could fit text to a region, transforms didn't require specific tools, it handled opacity properly, its bezier-editing tools were more refined, and a bunch of other things I'm probably forgetting.

Illustrator today has far more functionality (largely borrowed from Photoshop) than Freehand did, but Freehand had better core functionality than Illustrator (and it also introduced many of the features now in Illustrator, e.g. booleans).

Actually, if you're curious, just google freehand vs. illustrator -- it's pretty depressing how they compare despite freehand being 10 years old.

e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f8CKjsYS9k

The bezigon tool for one, a more sensible and thought-out feel and flow, lots of small features that Just Worked. It's been a while so I can't comment further, but Freehand was a far better tool for me. Illustrator is more of a hodgepodge / mishmash / design-by-committee thing somehow.